Unable to order backlog in Kanban board

[DATPROF]

When I try to reorder issues in a Kanban board, i'm presented with the following message:

JIRA Software cannot execute the rank operation. This board has recently been configured to use the Rank field. The system must be re-indexed before you can rank issues. Ask your administrator to perform a manual re-index.

So I log in ad adminstrator and start a re-index. Then in the atlassian-jira.log file I find a load of messages like:

2017-11-21 14:07:06,987 JiraTaskExectionThread-2 WARN feh 845x7904x1 c1vneo 192.168.20.112,0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1 /secure/admin/IndexReIndex.jspa [c.a.j.issue.index.DefaultIssueDocumentFactory] Error indexing issue PRV-345: Dropped: [customfield_10500

According to the following query:

select * from customfield where customfieldtypekey like '%rank%';

That field is:

10500 |       | com.pyxis.greenhopper.jira:gh-lexo-rank   | com.pyxis.greenhopper.jira:gh-lexo-rank-searcher   | Rank            | Global rank field for JIRA Software use only.            |              |           |         |

How should I proceed? I'm unable to get this working by just doing a re-index.

[Andy Heinzer · Accepted solution]

After looking closer at Ferdy's logs in a support ticket, we found this additional error in the logs:

2017-11-20 11:34:00,414 Caesium-1-2 WARN      [c.a.j.issue.index.DefaultIssueDocumentFactory] Error indexing issue SUP-1222: Dropping 'customfield_10500'
com.atlassian.greenhopper.manager.lexorank.LexoRankIntegrityException: Expected exactly 2 rows; the maximum marker row and the lowest ranked row for rank field[id=10500] 

In turn Ferdy was able to follow the steps in this KB Several actions such as issue ranking, move, export are failing - Atlassian Documentation in order to resolve this issue.   This KB has steps to follow in order to identify the missing markers and then use SQL commands to replace these while Jira is shutdown.

Cheers,
Andy

[Andy Heinzer]

What version of Jira Software or Jira Agile are you running?   When this kind of error happens, it is clear that these issues are not getting a rank value assigned to them, but this is something that should be happening almost immediately at the time the issue is first created provided that the Agile/Software plugin is up and running that the time this issue is created.   And again rank values change as issues are updated their location on a board or backlog as well.

There were a few known bugs that could cause this scenario, such as https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-10872 and/or https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JSWSERVER-11050

In those cases, this underlying problems were fixed many revisions ago, so they might not directly pertain to your situation.

But I think it still might help to try the workaround from JSWSERVER-11050 to see if this helps.

Workaround: 

1. run a rebalance with sysadmin user going to <JIRA-BASE-URL>/rest/greenhopper/1.0/lexorank/balance
2. run a Background reindex.

That URL should work with most JIra versions.  I think that the latest Jira 7.6.0 has change this URL to be /secure/GHLexoRankManage.jspa instead.  You can also navigate to this by going to the System Gear Icon -> System -> Advanced -> Lexorank management in order to attempt to rebalance the rank field.

If this doesn't help, I'd like to learn more about your specific version of Jira Software/Jira Agile and it might also help to see more log entries from around the time of the rank attempt.  It could be the logs will tell us more about this problem.  That specific entry you provided just tells us that Jira can't index the value for this field so it's being dropped.  It's not great to see that, but it doesn't give us more information as to why this is happening just yet.

Also that rebalance page should be able to tell us more about the lexorank health, as well as be able to run integrity checks against the ranking system.

Regards,
Andy

[DATPROF]

Thanks for the reply. I'm running JIRA Software 7.6.0. I've found the Lexorank management page.

It saids the following:

Field name: rank
Field id: 10500
Num ranked issues: 0 (wrong i think?)
Percentage complete: (blank)
Rank value distribution: 0,0,0
Rank status: Status: OK, Length: 0 / 254, Next balance: Scheduled

When I click Balance field I get the following error: Field ID 10,500 is not valid

If you need any more info, please let me know! Thanks for the help so far anyway!

[Andy Heinzer]

Hi,

Thanks for this information.  Given what we have seen so far, it looks like there is a serious problem with ranking not working correctly on the system.  As such I have created a support request on your behalf.

Please generate a support zip as requested there and you can then upload that zip file to that support ticket.  Once I can get a look at those logs we can better assess what the next steps are in order to resolve this issue.

Regards,
Andy